


old tricks (five times james bond didn't seduce eve moneypenny - and one time she seduced him)

by zauberer_sirin



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Developing Relationship, F/M, Flirting, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Mentions of Canon Relationships, POV Eve Moneypenny, Romance, Scars, Trauma, Unreliable Narrator, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Working Out My Feelings Through Fic, also i stole some imagery from THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO because of Craig!aesthetics, and the fic is basically about this, imo James Bond fucking for Queen and Country is not very consensual, it gets fluffy at the end but as we saw in CASINO ROYALE James gets pretty corny when he's in love, oblique references to coerced sex, sorry about the wordcount, writing THROUGH bond's gender politics instead of around them for the sake of sexy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:48:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26206690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: He disappears into the bathroom before Eve can refuse him again, the noise of water falling, the door only cracked wide enough for the gesture to betacticalrather than further innuendo. Something about the word lingering between them —offerhe had said, very specific — makes Eve’s skin crawl for some reason, not exactly out of disgustfor Bond.
Relationships: James Bond/Eve Moneypenny
Comments: 18
Kudos: 52





	old tricks (five times james bond didn't seduce eve moneypenny - and one time she seduced him)

**Author's Note:**

> look, I’m PAINFULLY aware that i’m just trying to deconstruct a misogynistic trope just because i like Daniel Craig’s and Naomie Harris’ faces and would like to see them make out a lot. it doesn’t make the trope any less misogynistic! but i suspect this kind of catharsis is why fanfic was invented in the first place.
> 
> furthermore: this goes AU halfway through SPECTRE because that film made no sense whatsoever. i'm also playing around with Bond's backstory and ignoring bits of SKYFALL and taking Vesper's assessment of James as the real thing. i'm taking his original accent as Scouse here.
> 
> plus i'm going to assume most MI6 field agents have fake names. basically i'm playing fast and loose with Bond canon here.

> “pleasure is the antidote to death, right?”  
>  _the little drummer girl_ , episode 1
> 
> “you know, i’ve changed my mind. it’s love. love is the antidote to death”  
>  _the little drummer girl_ , episode 4

+++

**one**

It’s almost the first thing he does after they meet.

Almost.

“M sent you?” he asks in lieu of a greeting.

“Running backup,” Eve specifies, as if it matters. “I’m the getaway driver if anything goes south.”

The famous 007 looks older than the mission reports suggest. She knows she scores better than him in the shooting range, in any case, which is why she is here today, watching his back, checking her equipment for the seventh time in the motel he’s holed up in, waiting until Ronson’s team meeting with their mark. 

007 himself is a sort of backup on this; a safety measure, they said back in London. The way they talk about him, it’s like Bond’s a “in case of emergency break glass” sign wearing human skin.

His body looks as tense as Eve has felt all day: the importance of this mission, all the lives that could be lost if they fail to secure that hard drive, that list.

“I’m taking a shower. Do you care to join me?” Bond is saying now, the second time he ever speaks to Eve, and it sounds like he is offering her something to drink instead.

Maybe for him it is as easy as having a drink.

He hasn’t even asked her name.

And he just assumed Eve knew his.

She smiles, elegant but without humour. She is not going to let herself be intimidated by his reputation, his brusque manners. She’s climbed too high up the MI6 ladder not to know how to handle bullies.

“You look older than your file,” she tells him.

He doesn’t seem offended.

“Is that a no?” he just asks, working the neck of his shirt open. The skin around his collarbone is carved with little scars of varying depth and age.

“Do you ask everyone you work with?” Eve says.

“Yes. Just talk to Ronson,” Bond replies. She finds herself smiling, genuinely this time, against her will. Then his voice is softer. “I just thought it was polite to offer.”

He disappears into the bathroom before Eve can refuse him again, the noise of water falling, the door only cracked wide enough for the gesture to be _tactical_ rather than further innuendo. Something about the word lingering between them — _offer_ he had said, very specific — makes Eve’s skin crawl for some reason, not exactly out of disgust _for Bond_.

Then she remembers reading Agent Fields’ file.

She remembers being angry at 007, someone she had never met before.

Perhaps she should have trusted that first instinct.

You can’t choose how to feel, when you’re a field agent, when you are running backup. You need to be able to care that you are saving someone’s life, even Bond’s, even if he’s a prick. You need to trick your head into thinking it matters. Bond gets results, which means his life saves many other lives, at the end of the day.

But then in a couple of hours Eve listens through comms and hears how 007 hesitates and rebels when M tells him to leave Ronson, leave him to bleed to death. She’s not sure anyone has ever hesitated taking orders from M before, Eve’s a bit scandalized at the audacity. So maybe it’s not so easy, not so clear-cut, what she reads on the mission reports. It’s not all about results. 

Or maybe Eve is just looking for an excuse when later, on the same day, she herself hesitates to follow M’s orders after she tells Eve to “take the bloody shot”.

**two**

In Macau she takes his razor and shaves him.

Bond makes a half-hearted pass at her and Eve feels it’s out of courtesy rather than genuine interest.

Otherwise, he’s a bit of a cock about the whole thing, including a jab at her loyalties.

Eve should be appalled but the truth is she’s almost relieved to have him here, between her hands, naked but for the towel around his middle, while she kneels to press the blade against his cheek. She’s relieved because she spent quite some time thinking she had killed him, that she had killed this body now in front of her. She discovered she didn’t like the feeling. That she was a bit relieved when the suspension from field work offered a measure of punishment to satiate her guilt.

Instead Bond is naked in front of her and he is solid and alive and among a constellation of scars on his flesh Eve can see the one from where she shot him, right there on his left side, darker than the pale skin around even in this soft light. It doesn’t look nearly as bad as the shoulder wound, it looks halfway healed but still painful. Everybody back in the office says 007 can take pain. A lot of pain. They say it with admiration. Eve draws her fingers towards his ribs, as if she wanted to reach and touch the scar, but decides against it at the last moment, and she wonders if she is in the wrong line of work, because this doesn’t exactly make her admire Bond.

It would be so easy now, when they stand so close, like this, after she towels the last traces of shaving cream off his jaw and he smiles almost sheepishly when she calls him an “old dog”. So close that Eve can feel Bond’s body heat radiating and crashing into her own skin in waves, so close that kissing would be easier than _not_ kissing, it’s more difficult to resist the pull. Eve could be that for him. It’s what he’s expecting, what everybody is expecting, including herself. And it would be good, she thinks. And she wouldn’t even regret it.

But after shooting him almost dead Eve figures she is the one who owes Bond not just an apology but a favor, and she figures maybe he could use a friend.

So she doesn’t sleep with him in Macau; but she bets everyone in London will assume she did anyway, when she comes back. Eve decides there and then, in front of Bond’s body, that maybe she will do nothing to dispel that notion. That, maybe, it’s good to have her own secrets. If they think she’s that predictable, then she can use that to her advantage. Intelligence agencies normally treat careers as a zero sum game, and Eve is a sore loser.

Later that evening she saves Bond’s life and he grins at her, cat-like, looking almost _too pleased_ to be the one who needs saving for once. Eve wonders if he considers that this makes them even, and if he prefers it better that way, doesn’t want anyone in his debt. He goes off to sleep with someone else that night, and in a few hours that woman will be dead.

Perhaps one thing doesn’t have to do with the other, but Eve has also read the file on Vesper Lynd.

**three**

They’re sharing secrets now. 

She is his mole. His accomplice, if one wants to get specific or legal or some other thing that might get Eve out of a job and on trial for treason against the Crown, probably. Her boss would probably want to get legal, if he found out. The head of the new Joint Intelligence Service, too, that little creep Denbigh. Eve knows what she is risking. There’s no point pretending she is not basically putting her career on the line here. For Bond.

(Eve does wonder when she made the decision; to believe this was the right thing to do, morally, tell herself she was doing this for more than just one man)

She calls him “James” now. Technically, she should be calling him “sir” but once she shot him almost dead and once she watched him mourn on the rooftop of their headquarters and now she is lying to the MI6 for him so she thinks she’s earned the “James”.

Or maybe he’s earned it, she’s not sure.

She helps him, knew she would the second he asked, the moment he told her (implied) he trusted her — right after Eve made a grand declaration about how James trusted no one. 

It was that easy. She was that easy.

It’s unlikely James finds this strange; he probably assumes it’s his natural charm. It isn’t. There are very few natural things about him, and none charming.

Digging whatever she can about the Pale King. She wonders if she does it for M as well as for James. She imagines unfinished business sting particularly when you’re a spy, and death is no easy fix for that. Eve didn’t know M that well, yet naturally she couldn’t help but admire the woman, once upon a time. That was before getting to know James, when part of Eve still wanted to have M’s job some day,once she had tired of field work. Mallory wouldn’t like hearing that. James would like it even less.

She presses her lips together in a private smile at the thought, turning around so James doesn’t catch it, wondering what it would be like, being his boss. She’s not sure the smile is gone by the time she slips the drive with the new data into his hand. His hands feel hot; for such a cold person his skin is always hot, she’s noticed.

“Thanks,” he tells her.

He’s already sent her flowers. Verbal gratitude seems besides the point.

“Do I want to know?” Eve asks, rather late in the game. She makes sure only to ask when the decision to help him is irrevocable. She might as well go for broke.

“No,” James replies, the tone humorously bitter. “But you’ll probably need to.”

There’s an implicit promise. They share secrets now, but James needs to figure out what they are first. He needs to go be 007. Eve needs to be Moneypenny. That’s how this works. This is what they do.

He’s told her things, though. Things Eve needs to know now: like how Q injected a tracking system into his fucking blood but it’s okay, James insists, because he’s holding off on reporting his location for now and Eve is horrified, not so much at this new technology, at the _violation_ of it, but at the way it doesn’t even faze James. This is the first time Eve ever wants to slap him in the face and honestly, she thought the impulse would have come a lot sooner in their acquaintance.

“I do mean it,” James adds, in a way that takes the wind out of her anger a bit. “The thank you.”

She turns towards him.

“Yes. I’ve sat through enough of your meetings with Mallory to know what it looks like, when you _don’t_ mean it.”

One of those rare occasions when the smile reaches those glacial eyes of his. It’s normally when someone is being petty near him, or when Eve is mutilating cars. He leaves the flash drive on the worktop. Eve wonders if he means for her to leave, with that gesture — sometimes they are not that good at communicating the most basic things. It’s entirely his fault of course. Sometimes he’s entirely too much like a robot somebody programmed with everything except the simplest commands.

He doesn’t mean for her to leave.

His hand is still hot, when he eventually presses it against the curve of her hip.

Yes, Eve has been wondering when it would come. This moment.

They are standing in the middle of his tragically bereft kitchen. The despair of that image alone would be enough to prompt anyone to fuck him. Eve hasn’t removed her coat. She didn’t expect to stay. She never does.

James moves, slow, for the predictable kiss. 

Slow enough for Eve to be able to disentangle herself from the attempt and chuckle softly in his face.

Again, he doesn’t seem offended. Eve was almost hoping he would, this time.

“Are you sure?” James asks her, all ego.

She reaches to peel his hand away from her waist, but she keeps it in hers instead, on a whim that, in all probability, is a much dumber move than having sex with 007. James looks a bit thrown by the contradicting gestures, but he doesn’t pull his hand away.

It’s warm too, there, inside Eve’s hand. A different kind of warm.

He’s not offended by her rejection but his eyes shine with a new curiosity and this is not quite exactly just his ego. More like he’s not sure what he’s supposed to say to her next, that their interaction was contingent on advancing from Eve’s “yes”.

She’s better at introspection than James: she realizes he doesn’t do it to be contrary, or because he can’t take a hint. It goes deeper, something that has been drilled into him, the same way firearms training has. A switch that can’t be turned off. James seems to have a lot of those. Violence, mistrust, sex. Maybe they’re one and the same switch.

“Is it because of that friend of yours? The one who pays you midnight visits?” he asks, quirking one eyebrow at Eve, thinking he’s found the key. Eve’s become a problem to solve — it makes her wonder if solving it would mean he lost interest, if Eve saying yes would be the end of it. Everything in his file and demeanor suggests he only understands sexual encounters as a one-time thing. This is not why Eve keeps rejecting him. That would be, in fact, one of the most appealing aspects of the deal for her.

He sounds a bit peeved when he mentions Eve’s lover — like he sounded that night on the phone when he realized Eve wasn’t alone in her house — but not jealous. Jealousy would be too normal an emotion for James. Instead it’s like he can’t think of another reason for Eve not to sleep with him than that it would get in the way of something else. Someone else.

Thus it would be a moot point trying to explain to him that it was just that, a friend who sometimes spends the night.

Perhaps she wasn’t that off the mark when she told him to get a life the other day.

She watches him rack his brain now, not for a way to get her to say yes, but for _an alternative_.

That’s when, further along that rabbit hole she’s been falling through since they first met, it occurs to her it’s a matter of balance, too; Eve has done something for him. He means to reciprocate, and it’s his instinct to go to this. Unlikely anyone has ever disabused him of this notion. Not in their line of work. For the first time ever she is not envious that he is 007 and she isn’t. She’s dodged more than a literal bullet.

“I see,” James agrees to whatever she hasn’t said out loud, and it sounds antagonistic rather than concealing. Maybe he doesn’t believe her.

Outside, the streets of West London have become quieter, all of the sudden. Eve realizes the late hour. These strange rendezvous with this even stranger man.

She squeezes his hand, her palm around his knuckles. The matching calluses around their trigger fingers are perhaps the only way in which they are similar. For a moment the comforting pressure of the touch stops her from thinking about the nanoshit coursing through his veins.

“We work together,” Eve tells him. “You don’t need to do that.”

She has to explain it like she’s talking to a small child. Maybe she is.

“It would be good,” James protests, words slowed down by a smirk filling his mouth like the most expensive scotch.

“Oh I bet it would.”

She knows it would, but she is more full of pity than she is curious, and she suspects James doesn’t ever want her pity. She finally understands the more unsavoury bits of his file, the way his _offers_ fall from his mouth so carelessly. But Eve is MI6: she herself is part of whatever rescued James from poverty, from delinquency, from orphanhood, the usual stuff, Eve can guess. _Rescued_ is a bloody ironic word if you ask her, and for a moment she thinks she might want to kill M, before remembering the M she wants to kill is already dead, that she actually admired M, once upon a time, that her death had left a mark on Eve. She doubts Mallory is going to be any better on this front, so she just pockets that anger deep inside, ready for when Eve needs it.

It’s good to want to burn the building you work in to the ground sometimes. It’s a nice, normal fantasy. Accountants have that fantasy.

But this is reality, where Eve is in the middle of 007’s kitchen, his hand cradled by hers quite awkwardly, and James is looking at her with a frown of concentration, as if she is explaining the convoluted rules to a very complicated card game.

“No more of this, James,” she underscores, threading her fingers with his, deciding she should stop holding James’ hand and they should hold hands instead. Together. That is nice. Or nice enough.

“No, ma’am,” he replies, and it sounds as dutiful as his offers of sex.

**four**

He runs.

It has taken him a long time, and it’s different from when he was pretending to be dead.

For one, he tells Eve his plans this time.

“Don’t tell Mallory,” James says as soon as she opens the door.

Like naughty children conspiring together against their headmaster. Eve was quite unruly in her years at boarding school — James seems to have fitted better, by all accounts. Maybe that explains all these attempts at rebellion in his middle age.

He steps into her flat without waiting for an invitation. Looking like James always does before heading off to do something unnecessarily dramatic to save the world. 

Eve wonders if the French woman he unsurprisingly went and fell in love with is still part of the picture. It’s fucking predictable of her, but Eve doesn’t really want to know the answer.

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” he comments, amused that a government spy could have such a messy home. Perhaps even more amused that Eve is messy. You wouldn’t know it by the way she wears a suit. You wouldn’t know it by the way she cleans a gun.

But he does spend a few too many seconds taking everything in view in — it makes Eve curious, that he looks curious, before discarding the thought altogether, because James is probably merely casing the place, looking for exits and weak points, in case trouble finds him in here and he has to defend himself. Eve doesn’t think her house would make a good fortress, and she bets James is thinking just the same from the way he’s intensely eyeing one of Eve’s saddest-looking succulents.

Then he sits on her couch, again without an invitation. There’s a new weariness to his movements. His gait reminding Eve of a boxer, not for the first time.

“I got everything you wanted,” Eve tells him.

“I expected nothing less from you, Miss Moneypenny,” he replies. It sounds both extremely hot and like he’s mocking Eve.

In the process of stealing for him ( _this time around_ and what has her life become) she has seen his file. His real file. The one even James doesn’t have access to. And now Eve might be one of the only three or four people alive who has read the name of his real hometown, and then where he grew up, what exactly M stole him from. Her and Mallory and maybe the PM and most likely the next pyscho bent on destroying James are the only ones, probaby. 

Eve feels the weight of that responsibility, having read his real file. She doesn’t want it.

She is thus one of the only three or four people on this planet capable of mentally conjuring what James must have _sounded_ like, before the pressure of Oxbridge or the necessity of MI6 missions eroded that accent off his tongue. She bets he sounded lovely, raw — but she’s still ashamed of finding this out without his permission.

“That’s alright,” he says when she confesses, as she sits down besides him. “I suspect your name isn’t really Eve.”

She smiles; he would be surprised at how many people really think she’s called Moneypenny. That there’s such a name.

His line would be flirty, if it didn’t sound so defensive.

Though, if she’s being honest, Eve doesn’t always know where the line between those two falls, with James.

“You’re not the only one,” she says, gripped by the oddest desire to appease him — or, more alarmingly, comfort him. “I still sound a lot like my mother, but I worked very hard not to sound like my mother.”

She knows it’s not the same, of course. But in the end they both lost parts of their voice for the sake of the Empire. Eve held on to more of herself. Perhaps it was too embarrassing, on top of her choice of a profession. She doubts James would understand that. He’s not only white, he’s Queen and Country through and through. He doesn’t get that _Empire_ is or should be an insult.

“You’re not an orphan,” James says suddenly, with less of a poker face. “That’s why you’re so different from the rest of us.”

He sounds like this is something he has been pondering for a while. Eve is surprised, no, shocked, to hear he gives her any thought at all outside the moments where they interact. She had imagined he forgot about her existence the minute she walked out of a room.

Different from whom? she wonders. Who is _us_ for someone like James Bond? Maybe Raoul Silva, she thinks grimly.

“You look tired,” he says, too, watching that particular shadow go through her expression. 

Eve doesn’t bother denying it. Bond flying the proverbial coop to try his hand at this late teenage revolt has… complicated things. It usually does, until he comes back to the fold and saves the day with his predictable heroics. It’s companionable, for a moment, the way they sit together on her couch, in silence, two weary agents. It should alarm her more, the image of 007 in the context of her house. He gets people hurt. He gets people killed. There’s a list of dead women in his file. Eve is smarter than letting him linger.

She _should_ be smarter. She should be smarter about a lot of things when it comes to Bond.

She massages the back of her neck. There’s an audible sound of something cracking, realigning somewhere in her body.

“Half the country looking for you and you are in my flat right now,” she says with a little chuckle, in awe of herself. Maybe even a little proud of herself.

Of course no one suspects her. This offends Eve a little. Like no one thinks she’s important enough to him, that he could trust her like this. But on the other hand it means James is kind of _her secret_ and the idea is not entirely unpleasant.

“I could…” James starts, his hand solid and heavy on Eve’s thigh, fingers splayed over the hem of her skirt in a way that should be uncouth, but for fuck’s sake, it’s actually sexy and Eve finally realizes _ah, so this is how he does it_. 

She is reasonably sure he means it as a gesture of gratitude this time, something friendly, even generous and giving, which says something about his already infamous ego, but it also says something entirely sadder about the kind of company he keeps. Or doesn’t, as it turns out. She would say something about that, make fun of him, except — in all honesty it’s quite probable that 007 is Eve’s best friend too. 

“Sorry,” he says, putting that hand away himself, looking down and scowling at his fingers, as if they did it on their own accord, betraying him. “We talked about this.”

Perhaps it’s good that he retreats so quickly and easily, before Eve can start thinking about how convenient it would be, how she bets James could scrub all that exhaustion off her skin with his expert touch. Eve bets he could make her feel so good. He’s probably practiced for that sort of thing, as thoroughly and dispassionately as he practices in the firing range. Another skill to be honed for the sake of England.

“It’s okay,” she says.

And because James thinks he doesn’t have anything else to offer, he leaves her flat as soon as it’s safe for him to do so. And sooner than it’s safe, Eve gets the feeling. Maybe he’s thinking about the different body counts in his file, too.

**five**

He almost dies.

Sure, it’s 007, he almost dies _a lot_ , but in her defense this is the first time he almost dies in Eve’s arms.

She assumes this is not novel for him, but perhaps a welcome respite from women dying on him all the time. 

(Eve doesn’t — die. On him, or at all. And she suspects that’s why Bond has spent the last year falling in love with her. It’s his way of saying thanks for not dying. It’s not a very flattering thought, is it, Eve?)

She is not much of a backup team. Too long since she has been on the field, despite her commitment to keeping her body and aim sharp through constant training, her last minute choice to come back to where the action is, now, because the world seemed to be on fire, because it looked like James might need some help. She still gets better marks than him in the shooting range, for all the good it’s done today. She’s not much of a backup but it’s the only one he has, and somehow she manages to drive him away from danger, change cars on the Croatian border in case someone is looking to finish the job, and get them far enough that they find a safehouse not even MI6 knows about.

They don’t know who to trust.

This is not exactly new.

Eve pushes him into the shower, peeling off his clothes while the hot water pours over his head, because she _needs_ to know the state of his wounds without all the blood (his blood, and three other men’s blood) getting in the way, she needs to see.

“It should be cold,” James says, trying to grip the temperature knob with broken fingers. “Blood flow…”

“Of course,” Eve says, turning the water icy cold instead, and she kicks herself mentally. She’s really not used to doing this and never again is she going to complain about Mallory’s fastidiousness making her check his phone calls against the official log at the end of each day. That job is much better than proding James’ broken body and trying to figure out which knife wound is going to kill him first.

It’s the first time she sees him completely and clearly naked, which must be some kind of an endurance test record when it comes to James and women in his acquaintance, and it’s horrifying; the warm, forgiving light of Macau had softened his scars enough to make them almost alluring, the night Eve knelt before him and shaved his stubble. The harsh light of the bathroom in here reveals everything and proves just how much of a fiction that image of James had been. She knew all this, read every injury in his file, even Le Chiffre’s unspeakable torture, but Eve still hisses out loud when she takes off his shirt and sees his chest. She wonders how anyone ever goes to bed with him after seeing _this_.

She keeps thinking about something James said to her once, early on, a million years ago, about how field work _isn’t for everyone_ and how at first Eve had thought it was patronizing but his tone had been kind and the line itself was whatever passes for kindness in James Bond’s fucked up head and now Eve wishes he would bloody retire or something, even though she sleeps better at night knowing he’s out there, being 007.

He’s finally unclothed, shivering in the tub, his big frame looking deceptively small there, while Eve throws gauze and alcohol and towels and swear words at the problem. James looks at her as she works to stop the bleeding, those alien blue eyes fixed on Eve’s face, questioning her with something still and unnerving, something that makes Eve wonder what James looks like when he’s scared. It’s idle speculation, of course, because fuck it if James is ever going to let her see him afraid. Whatever he is looking at her with right now it makes Eve want to tell him that everything is going to be okay, but they’re MI6 agents, they don’t deal in childish fallacies like that.

He’s still staring at her like he expects _something_. For a moment Eve dreads that he is about to thank her for getting them out of that fight and she knows she _will_ slap him if he does, and she’d rather not slap a dying man.

When he finally speaks, it’s not thanks that come out of his mouth.

“You’re not a soldier,” James says, his gaze practically burning on Eve’s skin.

“What?” she lifts her head, distracted from what she was doing by his forceful tone.

“Mallory might have been in the fucking Army but you’re not a soldier,” he says. 

He says it with a desperation that is hard to reconcile with everything she knows about the man. Jaw clenched until it looks like his teeth must ache. The force of his voice at odds with the sorry state of the rest of his body. 

Eve grabs his shoulders as if about to shake him, her nails digging deep into the flesh of his back.

“You’re not a soldier, either,” Eve tells him because she’s pretty sure he’s dying on her and she’ll be damned if he doesn’t get to hear at least that before he does. It sounds softer than his warning did, and James looks away from her face. 

“Shit, this hurts,” is his only reply, as he reaches for the gaping hole under his ribcage, the only time she has ever heard him complain of pain. 

Twenty minutes and a lot of ruined, red-drenched gauze later Eve is reasonably confident he is _not_ going to die in her arms and she feels almost drunk with that victory. It makes the adrenaline at the back of her mouth recede and settle into something different, less useful, but less dangerous, too.

She dares move him from the bathtub and sits him down on the toilet seat, so she can better work on him. She’s found every towel and blanket in the house and is drying his skin off carefully, inch by inch, making sure everything is nice and clean so she can finally apply sutures, set the bones that need setting. Eve wants him to start getting warmer, too. James keeps leaning to one side, struggling to keep upright, until he finds the rim of the sink, like he fears he might slip and lose balance. She rests her hands on his legs, calming him down, kneeling in front of him. The tiles on the bathroom floor make the position uncomfortable, and that feels wonderfully real right now.

Again she remembers him in Macau, putting his life in her hands and the blade to his neck like that was his only idea of foreplay. It feels like something that happened in a different life, to different people; Eve can’t remember what it felt like, not knowing James like she does now. James not knowing her.

(Hours ago she watched him kill someone with the same knife the man had first plunged between James’ ribs. It’s unfair but Eve thought it was kind of beautiful. She never claimed James was the only one with a fucked-up brain.)

For now his face has stopped bleeding long enough for her to take a good look at the irrevocably changed shape of it as she presses a towel to his wet hair.

“You already were boxer handsome,” Eve says, almost wistfully, as she draws the line of his broken nose with the pad of her thumb. “There was no need to go overboard.”

James manages a decent smirk, this time.

(He’s not dying on you, she reminds herself.)

“Why Moneypenny, I never knew you cared.”

He snakes up a hand (the hand that isn’t full of broken fingers, Eve notes darkly) to her waist, reaches out, his face still damp, tries to kiss her but he can’t lift his head high enough, mouth slippery over Eve’s neck. It’s almost comical.

“James, you’re too weak,” she says, which is different to all the other times she has refused his offers.

She’d be happy to accept it now, if that meant he is well enough, whole enough. She’d make that deal with the devil, right now: she’d fuck James Bond and join that infamous club as long as that meant he’s not in pain. 

But she is right about his strength, and he passes out as soon as Eve finishes stitching the other, more worrisome, wound on his side. By the time this happens he’s either too exhausted or his training has kicked in and he doesn’t even flinch when Eve pierces and pulls at the taut skin around the cut. When she puts the bloodied needle away she realizes that the new scar sits right besides the old gunshot wound mark, the one from Eve’s rifle. From the day they first met. Side by side like a mirror. She wonders if it means something. She wants it to. He passes out still leaning against the sink.

He’s heavier than he looks, Eve thinks, when she drags him to the bed, pressing the palm of her hand against his stomach — how the muscles there remain in tension when he’s unconscious is just another of the mysteries of 007. James is heavier than he looks and he _looks_ heavy. But she manages, her own arms carved by training and the adrenaline still animating her limbs whenever her brain shuts down.

For the moment Eve busies herself taking care of the minor stuff ( _minor_ , she scoffs at the word, because James’ minor injuries would kill any regular person) while he falls into a deep and heavy sleep. His breathing is loud and at least it doesn’t sound like he broke any ribs this time. The sound is a terrible, comforting lullaby to Eve as she works on his body.

James doesn’t even wake up when she bandages his hand tight, setting the fingers the best she can so they’ll heal right.

Later they do end up sharing a bed, after so many years, not entirely because Eve needs to crash somewhere as well and the couch looks derelict, but because she needs the physical proximity to make sure he’s all right, and hours later James is suddenly awake next to her while the purple light of late afternoon smoothes out the crinkles in his eyes as he stares out at Eve, and he doesn’t make one of his smug and slightly pathetic remarks, he doesn’t repeat his _offer_ at all and Eve wishes he would, just to know everything is normal between them. Normal and safe. She’s pumped him full of every painkiller she could find or acquire on their way here, and that doesn’t seem nearly enough. Under the covers his body rises and falls with every breath, as deep and even as when he was sleeping.

“You’ve saved my life,” he says from the pillow.

His breathing is barely a thread, only audible between the two of them, as he’s obviously trying to get the air in and out very carefully through bruised body parts.

But he’s alive and almost smiling at her and Eve’s last traces of adrenaline ebb away to be replaced by something else, something warmer, and unfamiliar.

“Don’t say it like it’s the first time,” Eve teases him, mimicking James’ posture, resting her head on the crook of her elbow.

“No,” he agrees. “More often than the other way around, too.”

“Maybe I should have been 007,” she declares.

“I’m glad you’re not,” James tells her, all serious, his voice so unlike him. “I’m glad you’re you instead.”

Eve thinks of all the pills she’s made him swallow. She smiles.

“When you wake up you won’t remember you’ve just said that,” she points out, still playful.

“That’s all right,” James says, mouth pasty from exhaustion and drugs. “You will.”

He’s right.

**one**

There’s a new 007.

She is younger, better than James. Less encumbered by tradition.

James likes that about her. 

Of course he does.

But the new 007 is still an orphan like the rest. Still more like James in her ragged edges than anyone wants to admit right at the moment. Or admit that this is the reason they chose her in the first place. They don’t want to see it. _She’ll be trouble_ , Eve thinks, like another one of her secrets, feeling smarter than anyone else in the office. Knowing that _she is_ smarter. Q would probably be appalled at the notion.

When the new 007 does turn out to be trouble James has her back, just when she needs it. No doubt he thinks about it as balance. A debt he owes. Eve hates that. She knows by now it’s James’ way of caring, because no one ever bothered telling him he’s allowed to just care. She still hates it.

They burn James’ records one afternoon, deep down the basement, the real ones, the ones that were never digitalized, as some passing the torch bullshit, Mallory’s idea, Tanner getting teary-eyed, but it all means very little when Eve has such a good memory. 

If this is meant to protect James then Eve is a liability.

She is on the field again, stubborn, still scoring perfect on the shooting range, but she doesn’t want M’s job anymore. She doesn’t want to be the person saying “take the bloody shot” through the comms and filling the world with more Bonds and Moneypennys. She thinks this iteration is more than enough, her and James. It should stop with them.

Except — 

He’s not 007 anymore.

What the hell he is Eve is not sure. Just that he still comes to her when he needs a safe place to hide. Or just a safe place.

It hadn’t occurred to her that maybe this time he also needed Eve to know he was alive. That he didn’t want her to worry.

“Stop faking your own death, James,” she admonishes when he shows up at her door. “It’s an old trick.”

“Old dog,” he says, pointing at himself.

It doesn’t sound flirty. _Finally_ it doesn’t sound flirty. It just sounds like a private joke. Which is much better. Which is much worse.

The uneven shape of his nose does make him more handsome, as she predicted, but Eve hates looking at it.

He moves through her apartment with both familiarity and restraint. She can see his exhaustion in the edges of his eyes. Or maybe he’s right and he’s old now, finally. Eve wishes age would slow him down somehow, but she knows it won’t: she’s always known James was going to die on the field — somehow this certainty hasn’t stopped her from falling in love with him.

“What happened to the cactus you had here?” James asks, like he’s interrogating a prisoner, pointing at a very specific spot on her windowsill.

“It was a succulent,” Eve corrects him, as if it makes a difference. James looks annoyed, not at the correction but at the fact that he got it wrong. What’s baffling to Eve is that he remembers at all, but that’s spy memory for you. She admits: “It died last year.”

“Right.”

It should say something about Eve that she can’t even keep something that requires no care alive.

“Why are you here, James?” she asks.

“Do you want me to leave?”

He’s still the boor everybody in headquarters complained he was.

“That’s not what I meant, don’t play the fool.”

And he’s a lot of odious things, but he’s not a fool.

James takes a long moment to reply.

“There’s no one else,” he says.

No one else he trusts.

James trusts Mallory with the world, but not with himself. And Mallory trusts James, God help us all, Eve thinks with a little hopeless smirk. Maybe she and James are more similar than she imagined. Addicted to loyalty. Maybe that’s why she is here, protecting charming white men and their pathetic delusions of grandeur, instead of being richer, happier, in the private sector.

She wonders what happened to Dr. Swann; she is not a footnote on a file, like Fields. She is not the all-consuming whirlpool at the center of all of James’ failed psychological evaluations, like Vesper. In fact, she is not on any file. Maybe James has managed to break a tradition.

“What do you need?” she asks him, down to business.

Eve has her own delusions of grandeur.

“Your passwords, all of them,” James says, lips twitching like he’s fighting a smile at Eve’s expense, how easily she gives into him. Then he eyes her couch like it’s the most luxurious view he’s ever beholden. “And a couple of days.”

He just assumes that Eve is going to spy on her colleagues for him. He’s not wrong. She’s done it before. 

He’s not playing their game anymore. “They” being Gareth, the MI6, the government, even the Queen. Even his own game. He’s done with all that. Which is why he can still be a spy and sleep on Eve’s couch, soundly, arms hugging himself, like he doesn’t expect anyone to try to slit his throat in the middle of the night. 

Or like he expects Eve to protect him if someone does.

That’s a heavier responsibility than a list of names and places in his file.

But she prefers it.

If James doesn’t need to be 007, she doesn’t need to be Moneypenny, and they don’t need to be a cliché, or the denial of a cliché, which is just as tedious. Eve wonders where that leaves her? Out in the cold, probably.

She tries to sleep in her bed, even though she doesn’t expect she’ll be able to, all too aware James is out there down the hallway in the living room, snorting softly on her couch. He also assumed she was going to let him stay, like this is something they’ve done before. It isn’t.

Eve leaves her door ajar, _tactical_ , though it’s not like she needs to make that distinction. It’s not like James is going to come knocking.

She spends hours thinking about how her bosses would be none too happy with her decision to let him stay, and it’s strange no one has caught up with their little game yet, hers and James’. She guesses they still don’t consider her important enough. They were smart, her and James, to keep certain things (like how they once shared a bed the day Eve finally repaid an old debt) between them, otherwise she couldn’t offer him a safe haven like this. But it’s still appalling, Eve thinks: they’re British Intelligence, she can’t believe no one has noticed in all these years, they’re supposed to pay attention. 

Though they probably still assume she had sex with James, back in Macau. 

She finally wakes him up in the middle of the night, sitting on whatever little room his body leaves on the couch. Against what should be his best spy instincts James is not alarmed when Eve wakes him. Her touch is not alarming. He’s still completely clothed, except for his shoes, jacket and the holster with its gun he has left on the floor, well within his immediate reach. He’s wrinkling that very expensive shirt of his against her couch.

“Eve?” he asks. She can see his eyelids struggling up and down, she can see details, even in this darkness.

Her first name rolls off his tongue, easy as anything, like it’s always there, on his mind, and every time he has ever called her “Moneypenny” has taken him some effort to do so. This is an unfair revelation, but Eve remembers she had already decided to wake him up before finding this out. It will make things easier, though. Not that she thinks James would ever (or could ever) reject anyone coming to sleep with him. She just hopes he considers it more of a choice, for once.

“The day we met I thought I had killed you,” she says, like that explains something. Like she is trying to decide if she regrets she didn’t.

“I was sure you had killed me, too,” James replies. 

It wasn’t my best shot, Eve thinks.

This is my best shot, Eve thinks.

She touches his side through the blanket. She wonders how the old scar is doing these days. She thinks about it as _her scar_. James puts his hand over hers, pressing it against his body. Eve imagines that’s his way of telling her he agrees, that it’s hers indeed.

The idea sets her body in motion. She kisses him. She feels a bit daring, doing this. This man is a machine that kills, Eve feels brave kissing him, climbing on top of him, her legs bracketing his hips.

When she was a student one of Eve’s favourite subjects had been maths, which had brought on a special obsession with tessellation during a particularly dull summer in Dorset — the idea of endlessly fitting pieces, leaving no gap between them, appealed to the suppressed romanticism of an otherwise fastidiously pragmatic teenager. She blames this fixation for some of the later disappointments in her personal life. Like part of her couldn’t let go of the idea of finding a formula for a perfect fit — To fit where? In the world? In her job? With another person? Eve is not sure, but there were some teen expectations there, which were never fulfilled.

Having James in her life, under the weight of her body, and against her lips, is probably the opposite of tessellation, Eve ponders as she presses him down on her couch.

He doesn’t kiss her back immediately, startled. By traces of sleep, or because he’s no longer used to this. Eve lifts her head to watch him react.

“Oh, you’re offering now?” he finally says, twisting his mouth.

It’s meant to be light, but Eve hates the word.

He also sounds a bit antagonistic, because of course he does.

She shakes his head, kissing him again. She’s asking. And she’s giving. But it’s not about balance.

For a moment she fears it might be too late, too far into their inaccurately called relationship, that they missed their window. But then James starts kissing back, mouth burning hot, kissing Eve like he has wanted to do this before, _actually_ wanted it, and Eve wonders if it’s a lie for her benefit, because he’s such a good liar, and it doesn’t matter if it is, because that would be James’ way of being kind and either option spreads a sharp bite of arousal through Eve’s body.

She pulls at the buttons of his shirt, wanting to see James’ body in a context that’s not about his pain, how much he can take. Maybe this is the only reason she’s doing this. No: she’s doing it for all the reasons she hasn’t done it before.

In the dark she can feel his scars as indentations on a landscape, more than see them — it makes it a bit better, like they are part of James, rather than something that was done to him.

He doesn’t talk during sex, which is something anyone could have called from a cursory glance at his file. He helps Eve out of her t-shirt, caressing over her vertebrae with his thumb as he goes. She kisses his neck, and bites down on the curve of his shoulder, hard. He seems to like that, another thing you don’t have to be a therapist to have guessed at. But he likes it so much that Eve decides she doesn’t want to wait anymore and reaches between their bodies, sinking into him with his collarbone pressed against her lips.

Eve can’t remember the last time she fucked on a couch, the last time she fucked this impulsively; it becomes a little too much when James draws his hand across her stomach and where their bodies meet, demanding like with everything he does, pressing hungry fingers against her clit. It was _too much_ already before, the feeling of James inside her, so she grabs his hand by the wrist and guides it to her hipbone instead, and he understands immediately that she means for him to anchor her.

As expected, his face doesn’t reflect much emotion, what a good little spy James is. But Eve watches his throat, the way his Adam’s apple works up and down in nervous motion.

His breathing is too deep and too shallow at the same time. He thrusts up, the rest of his body very still, like stuck in place, his fingers digging into Eve’s flesh, above her waist. She registers how strong that grip is, confirming with some pride that the bones in his fingers healed right, from when she set them in a filthy safehouse last year.

James fucks her like he is trying to remember how to do this outside a mission. Eve hopes this isn’t actually true or perhaps she really is going to have to quit her job and burn the Vauxhall building to the ground, and possibly not in that order. 

And he’s gentle. No, no, wait, that’s entirely the wrong word (he’s still James, after all); he’s careful.

It’s good — but, Eve suspects, not in the way he meant the word “good” when he said it after he tried to kiss her in his kitchen. She wonders if that disappoints him.

James turns his head to one side when he is about to come and Eve grabs him by the hinge of his jaw, turns his gaze back to her, almost forcefully, so he has to watch her face when it happens. James takes the gesture like he takes everything, like a challenge, and for once that works in Eve’s favour. His stubbornness has always turned her on.

Afterwards he doesn’t stop touching her, which surprises Eve, she’s not done being surprised apparently, by him, by herself, by _this_. By how he swallows the last shudders of her orgasm and keeps kissing her as she separates their bodies, an audible groan travelling from James’ mouth to hers. No one would have pegged Bond for someone who cuddles, and perhaps he doesn’t, exactly, but he lets Eve rest on his chest, her elbow over his heart, and he seems content enough with the arrangement. He seems content enough.

He kicks the messy remnants of their clothes off the edge of the couch, and he pulls the blanket over him and Eve, even though it’s warm enough, even though his shin feels hot and sweaty against Eve’s ankle. Her whole body aches sweetly, releasing years-long tension against the harsh contours of James’ body, nothing there soft or uncarved.

It’s Eve the one who breaks the silence first — the silence that has stretched, rather comfortably, for about an hour since she first kissed him — and somehow it doesn’t feel like a weakness.

“Helen,” she says.

“What?” James asks, distracted by Eve’s hair all over his cheek.

“You never asked to see my file in return. My real name’s Helen.”

“ _Is this the face that launched a thousand ships_?” James says, route, not missing a beat.

“Oxbridge boys,” Eve complains.

A hand on the back of her neck, his fingers buried in her curls, indulgent.

“My name really is James,” he says. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to keep it.”

She nods. Even if it wasn’t James he’d keep it. Even when he is not 007 he still is. You cannot un-erase an accent, you can only learn again. She still has enough of Helen to recognize herself in the name when she says it out loud. For James… Let’s say scorching is the best way of destroying evidence.

Eve pulls the blanket aside, wanting to see him even in this darkness. It’s kinder on the ruined map of his body, this way. Her hands search for the old wound, the one that’s hers and hers alone. It makes her want to fuck him again right now, so soon, this thought.

She presses her thumb against the scarred skin. It’s been years, she realizes. It’s faded but very palpable. 

“Does it hurt?” she asks.

“Not one bit,” James says, shaking his head. Eve feels his stubble nicely brushing against her temple when he does. He would deny it even if it hurt — pain is something he only admitted to her once, when he was trying to distract her from an even bigger confession. He looks down at Eve’s fingers over the spot. “I sometimes forget it’s there.”

That’s probably true of all his scars. And yet: _Good_ , Eve thinks. Because she never does.

“I don’t like forgetting about it,” James adds, reaching to rub the scar, slipping his hand under hers.

“Don’t tell me you’re sentimental?” Eve says, approaching a chuckle.

He smiles a slow and knowing, almost sleepy, smirk. “Don’t tell me you’re only figuring that out now?”

Eve bits her lower lip. It tastes like him. James watches her for a moment and then lifts his fingers to her cheekbone, pressing not tenderly but with care.

“I don’t know about a thousand ships,” he tells Eve. “But at the very least a medium-sized fleet.”

He’s completely and ridiculously serious.

“Godamnit, James,” is all she can think to say in return.

He closes his eyes, while Eve stares at him with urgency, resting her chin under his collarbone. She can feel more scarred skin pressed against her jaw. Her body twitches, all too aware of nakedness touching nakedness.

“I didn’t mean for it to be a secret,” James says to her, oddly dignified. His eyes remain closed. “But you kept saying no.”

“You didn’t really want me,” Eve tells him, dumb before the enormity of the implication. “You kept doing it because… that’s what you always do.”

James lets out a gruff moan, he opens his eyes. “I did want you. Or I thought — but it’s not like I know the difference. Is it?”

_Bloody hell_ , Eve thinks, _this machine just passed the Turing test_ and it’s unkind and patronizing but it also makes her feel a lot more for this man. It turns out that Eve didn’t have to fix him, or teach him how to love, or help him recover his humanity, or any other cliché she was expecting would be fulfilled between them. This is not that story — James is not that story, much as she tried to put him in a neat, safe box.

James draws a long breath under her weight. He still has a lot more sleep to catch. He’s not 007 anymore. Legally he’s not even alive. But he is what he is. Someday he will die on the field, on a mission. He is who he is. Eve doesn’t expect, or want, that to change.

He closes his eyes again, thoroughly exhausted. He asked for two days; she gave him but a handful of hours. Greedy Eve.

“Wake me up if you want some more,” James mutters against her neck, his voice playful and filthy and weightless.

He turns on his side, nestling Eve between his chest and the back of her couch, wrapping one arm around her waist. 

She does want more, how could she not, but she lets James be for the moment, wondering if that has ever happened to him before. Maybe James knew she would, when he made this new offer. Maybe that’s why he loves her. Eve decides that’s okay, there are worse reasons to love someone.

And, after all this fuss, Eve still believes the world doesn’t need any more Bonds and Moneypennys — because this iteration, her and James, they got it perfect this time around.


End file.
